Politicos on the move this week: Parl Sec shuffle and media movement

Every week he’s shufflin’. Days to go before the engines of Parliament rev up again and the prime minister announced this week a Parliamentary Secretary shuffle, which follows his cabinet re-tooling and whip-replacing moves in the face of the new Trump administration in the U.S.

Summa Strategies has a full list that handily breaks down who went unchanged and who’s at a new post.

Notably, Arif Virani was posted to a new Parl Sec job for the Heritage minister covering the multiculturalism file. Professional question period duelist Mark Holland was moved over to Public Safety and away from Democratic Institutions, while David Lametti was moved from International Trade over to Innovation. Gatineau MP Steven McKinnon takes up the Public Works file — a department still struggling with the problem-plagued Phoenix pay system the government at one point thought it would have fixed by October last year (oops!). Sean Casey also moves off Justice and over to Heritage (replaced by Marco Mendicino), and Joel Lightbound was promoted to a post on the Health portfolio.

A few MPs also were booted from their secretarial posts: John McKay, Randy Boissonnault, Emmanuel Dubourg, Michel Picard, Leona Alleslev, and Anju Dhillon. The government’s new Whip, Pablo Rodriguez, had also vacated a secretarial post.

Average age of those being shuffled out of cabinet: 62. Average age of those being sworn into cabinet/moving: 41 #cdnpoli#lpc

Postmedia’s chief financial officer Doug Lamb is also on the way out, making him the second exec who netted a six-figure retention bonus to leave the company. The Globe has details on the $2 million awarded in bonuses here.

#Postmedia CFO Doug Lamb is leaving the company at the end of Feb. Last year, he was awarded a $450,000 retention bonus. #cdnmedia

iPolitics columnist Susan Delacourt is taking over the insider-y Canada 2020 podcast Brief Remarksfor its second season. It was previously hosted by well-known Liberal insider and TV pundit Rob Silver, and the former PMO policy assistant and generally bright lady Jennifer Robson, currently a professor at Carleton University. “They have not killed us off … but they sort of have,” Silver noted.

Adding to the long list of key appointment openings, the federal government posted Jean-Pierre Blais’ job of CRTC Chairman (although the Globe and Mail notes it’s “often thankless”). His term expires in June, but that doesn’t mean he won’t hold on to the post. That brings the total of top CRTC job postings to four, including former chairman Raj Shoan, who lost his spot on the commission back in June.

Some notable movement in the lobbying community: Shoppers Drug Mart picked up the Liberal dynamic duo Lisa and Warren Kinsella, and the Alberta town of Vegreville hired Lee Funke to arrange meetings with feds on the controversial and job-lossy relocation of its immigration case processing centre.

In a major Quebec political shakeup, Quebec’s Agriculture Minister Pierre Paradis (the brother of federal Liberal MP Denis Paradis) has been ejected from both cabinet and caucus following revelations he’s the subject of a police investigation. La Presse reports he’s apparently under investigation for sexual misconduct. Just a few days ago it was announced Paradis was going on leave after a horse-riding accident (but that’s a horse of a different colour).

And finally, still in the agriculture world, Mathieu Paré is the new director of the Canadian Beef Centre of Excellence.